My personal tips to help Stage 1 non governmental organizations become a super growth N.G.Os.

In another article, ‘learning from the best: The Non Governmental (civil society) growth progression, I have outlined the various stages in which N.G.Os go through before they reach the super apex level. Any organization in the stage 1 of the N.G.O sector growth should desire to reach that level because the benefits are obvious. Firstly, at that level you act as a partner to the government and at times become assimilated to be part of the government. This means that usually you have all forms of resources at your disposal and you find yourself involved in policy formulation. The second obvious benefit is that at that level you are less involved in the implementation of projects and become only concerned with the monitoring and evaluation activities. This means you no longer have to do all the hard work but you allow others to do it on your behalf and go under less scrutiny from the donors and the government. This however does not mean that it is a ticket to become corrupt and fleece from the government as you will discover below. It just means that you have proven yourself to be so trustworthy and effective that you can advise and monitor other organizations performance

So to quicken the pace at which an N.G.O takes to go through the following stages, it is advisable to do the following at every level. My past experience even though short has taught me that it is possible to reach the super apex level in a period of five years if the right strategy and motivation is considered. Already within a year of active work, the organization that I helped found is in the second stage and receiving funding for projects even without writing a proposal! I believe that if it sticks to the script it will achieve the desired level in less than five years.

So first and foremost one must get the fundamentals right in any activity that one wants to engage in for investing in the stock exchange, those fundamentals include not being greedy, understanding the financial statements, most importantly the net book value and being patient. For the N.G.O sector it follows the same parallels like having a genuine passion, understanding the root causes of the problem you wish to address and remaining focused. I have already written another article on “Building effective and successful Non Governmental Organizations: Have a genuine passion” to elaborate what I mean and for stage 1 organizations, there is nothing as paramount as that. This means that if you are taking care of orphans at you home, do not do it because you know that Children are the fastest donor money generating activity but because you are deeply concerned for welfare of the children. A genuine passion will soon be seen in the choices you make while running the children’s home and also by the donors who are interesting in supporting your organization.

I once interacted with an international volunteer of the World Council of Non Governmental Organizations and she said that globally, there is so much funding available to ‘help out’ but that funding has not yet found a genuine partner. That is why philanthropists started working with African governments and when the governments become corrupt, they started working with N.G.Os and when the N.G.Os became corrupt, they started working with Community based organization groups. However, these small organizations do not have the capacity to handle such large funds and so does the funding organization lack the time to be concerned with the little details. Therefore currently there is a gap waiting to be filled by intermediary organizations that have a genuine passion to their causes.

As a stage 1 organization, the second thing that you need to do is to seek the proper registration documents. My advise has been that you should always desire to become registered as an N.G.O instead of being registered as a self help group, a welfare society, a youth group, a community based organization, an informal school etc. This is because one’s scope of activities can be broadened to cover all issues related to that particular activity and at the same time, the organization will therefore be allowed to source for funding directly from any local or international organization. The requirements, however, to register as an N.G.O are strict but one can be able to meet those requirements by tapping into the resources of other more knowledgeable persons that are willing to assist the organization. This can be done by employing the third strategy to boost super growth; inviting volunteers to your organization.

There is nothing as potent for a stage 1 organization as inviting volunteers and especially international volunteers to participate in its activities. Volunteers normally come with all the resources needed by the organization to support itself starting with; time by providing extra hands to do all the necessary work, skills which will help in the management of the organization in terms of book keeping, service delivery, ideas through shared experiences and other interactions through observation and exposure and finally other resources that include donated items and funding. Normally volunteers get touched by the needs that they see and the motivation of the founders to address the need in question. They go and tell their friends of the experiences they have had thus creating a lot of publicity for the stage 1 organization. Once that publicity is created, additional volunteers come and participate in the project and they too come with more time, skill and resources to support the project. By understanding how to manage the volunteers properly, this grassroots organization is able to grow so fast even to levels never envisioned before. It can then select from its list of volunteers some to become members of its board to transfer the needed skills and resources into the organization.

In conclusion, the above three tips can be classified into personal character attributes tips, management tips and resource mobilization tips. There are many other attributes that each classification will require like honesty, transparency and involvement respectively but I have decided to focus this article on the key tips. If you notice the use of volunteers leads automatically to a stage/level 1 organization becoming a level 2 organization. It even at times helps the organization jump the level 2 stage and to quickly enter the level three stage